Medical errors are the third cause of death in the United States leading to around 250,000 deaths every year. The limited amount of training time available for residents and the outdated methods currently used for training give rise to the need for a more efficient training framework to facilitate the acquisition of surgical skills and overcome the medical errors problem. The proposed research addresses this problem in robot-assisted surgeries. In these surgeries, a surgical robot is directly controlled by a surgeon to perform the procedure inside the patient's abdomen. This setup allows us to record valuable surgical data such as the surgeon's movements and eye gaze.

We propose using the collected data to improve the training for novice surgeons in robot-assisted surgeries. Analyzing the collected data will enable us to understand what distinguishes experts from novices. Furthermore, this will enable us to understand the underlying principles of the surgical skills. This understanding will then be used to develop innovative training methods that will allow experts to remotely transfer their skills to novices. This will also enable us to automate some surgical sub-tasks to help surgeons in the operating room.

What does it mean to you to have received a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship?

It is a great honor to join the prestigious club of Vanier Scholars. For me, it is all about the recognition at the national level for all the hard work in the last few years. I still remember my first days as a graduate student, hearing about the amazing profiles of Vanier Scholars and dreaming to be one them. It is very exciting that now this dream has become true. It is also a big responsibility because I should strive to keep the momentum going, conduct the highest quality research while continuing to serve the community and improving my leadership skills.

How will the scholarship help you?

It will help me focus more on my research. It will also make it easier to establish collaborations with other leading groups worldwide in my research area. It will also be a reminder for me that maintaining a well-rounded lifestyle that focuses not only on research, but also on leadership and community service always pays off. sometimes way more than one would expect.

I'm working towards enabling the machine learning hardware revolution. My research focuses on rethinking CAD tools to rapidly create efficient machine learning hardware implementations on FPGAs, a specific kind of computing structure. This project will enable people that have no hardware design experience nor are machine-learning experts to properly program FPGAs, taking advantage of their full potential. This will require tailoring machine learning algorithms to the unique characteristics of the FPGAs as well as developing a new design ecosystem using a higher degree of abstraction, permitting simple yet efficient FPGA programming.

What does it mean to you to have received a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship?

It is not only a great validation of my research but also a validation of some other big decisions that I made throughout my life. I volunteered at different non-profit organizations that really mattered to me. It turns out that those things ended up helping my application quite a lot. It feels like a great validation of my entire career. I am thrilled and honored.

How will the scholarship help you?

I feel definitely more confident to pursue my research. The financial support is also great. It relieves the financial stress of being a student and gives me the freedom to focus on my research and personal life.

Thermionic electron emission from CNTs has recently been an emerging field of research due to the heat trap effect, which has significantly reduced the optical power intensity required to reach a thermionic emission temperature in CNTs compared to the bulk materials. The heat trap effect observed in CNTs is due to the highly anisotropic thermal conductivity along the nanotube axis. Moreover, the heat trap effect is observed over a wide spectrum of incident light which has made the CNTs particularly suitable for harvesting solar energy. Our research group at UBC has already demonstrated a simple yet effective thermionic solar converter based on CNTs, where we achieved a current and power density comparable to that of the state-of-the-art solar photovoltaic cells. If properly designed, CNT based thermionic solar converter can significantly exceed the efficiency of the conventional photovoltaic solar cell. However, the efficiency of the device reported by our group was quite low which can be substantially enhanced by reducing the work function of the CNTs. My PhD research is focused on reducing the work function of the CNT array by treating the surface of the ensemble with different low work function materials. I have shown that the work function of the CNTs can be reduced by introducing specific adsorbate materials using physisorption or chemisorption process. However, since the thermionic emission of electrons requires a very high temperature, not all the adsorbates can form a stable layer over the CNT surface at an elevated temperature. Therefore, while choosing an adsorbate for work function reduction, we need to consider the strength of the bond that the adsorbate makes with the CNTs.

In my research, I will investigate the thermal stability of the bonds that the adsorbates form with the CNT and compare it with the extent to which the CNT work function is reduced by different adsorbates. Therefore, I will develop a mechanism to reduce the work function of the CNTs using thermally stable adsorption of specific materials, which would significantly enhance the performance of the CNT based thermionic electron emitters and make the cathode structure robust to high-temperature operation as necessary in thermionic emission.

What does it mean to you to have received a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship?

Receiving the prestigious Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship was one of the most significant and memorable achievements in my academic career. The Vanier Scholarship has motivated me to pursue an academic and research-oriented career through which I can make a difference and do something innovative to put a positive impact on my society.

How will the scholarship help you?

This scholarship will work as a milestone in achieving my academic and research goal and help me further to build my leadership quality.